NDPR Herman Cappelen The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.02.3 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Herman Cappelen, The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment, Oxford University Press, 2023, 244pp., $84.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198886518.

Reviewed by Jason Brennan, Georgetown University

When I first started tinkering in democratic theory, I read a book (I’ll decline to identify which) in which the author investigated what it takes to conduct a particular activity in a democratic manner. Unsurprisingly, the answer involved adopting the author’s own substantive and convoluted ideological commitments. Rather than arguing directly that these commitments were correct or good, the author tried to smuggle them into the concept of “democracy” itself, pushing the line that everyone who cares about democracy thereby implicitly shares the author’s controversial commitments. Of course, that’s false, but it relieved the author of having to produce a...